When you think outside two boxes

“Yucks to the max!” “How many nights of sleep did he lose over this one?” and “Any three-year-old kid can also come up with it.”

Since its launch on April 2, the newly re-branded National Gallery Singapore’s logo has been generating a surprising amount of Internet chatter. For critics, the new logo only serves to reinforce the stereotype that Singaporeans aren’t creative.

The logo, which consists of two bar graph style rectangles with the gallery name underneath, has been ridiculed for being too bland and simple. Netizens looking at the logo complain about the government wasting money on something so simple (though for the record Asylum, the company behind the design, has stated that they only charged “a very nominal fee” and did it “as part of our national service”).

“Thinking outside the box” is a common refrain when discussing the stereotypical lack of creativity among Singaporeans. The National Gallery Singapore’s new logo seems doubly unfortunate in this respect; the designer seems to have thought outside the box by designing two boxes side by side.

The logo has now gone viral as a meme, courtesy of blogger Mr Brown, who has variously transformed the two blocks into a figure on its back, an ark on the new film poster for the movie Noah, a bat-signal and a computer game screenshot.